It's a grey area... Was: Re: eye colour and other queries

[Carol]

Carol earlier:
> > No doubt Noah Webster, who took the "u" out of "colour," is
responsible. 
> 
> Geoff:
> Now I know who to blame for one of my favourite beefs about 
spelling differences. Like many UK speakers, I pronounce words like 
'colour' differently to the way I would if it lacked the 'u'.

Carol again:

I've mentioned him before but not in any detail. Here's a link if
you're interested:

http://www.m-w.com/info/spelling-reform.htm

Needless to say, not all of Webster's proposed reforms were accepted!

If you want to find out about good old Noah in more depth, here's a
link to his essay on spelling reform (he thought that Americans needed
to escape from the restrictive influence of Britain--sorry! Please
consider the era):

http://edweb.sdsu.edu/people/DKitchen/new_655/webster_language.htm

(The only proposed changes in this essay that were ultimately accepted
by Americans are "plow" for "plough" and "draft" for "draught.")

Here's a link to his spelling book, which does *not* use simplified
spelling, and which kids these days would find a nightmare rather than
an aid to spelling:

http://www.merrycoz.org/books/spelling/SPELLING.HTM

Scroll down past the introduction and all the recommendations and
prefaces for the spelling book itself.

Carol earlier:
> > Didn't George Orwell try to do something similar with British
spelling, or did he just try to reduce the vocabulary to "Basic English"?
> 
> Geoff:
> Without looking things up, I have a feeling you *may* be confusing 
him with George Bernard Shaw who had a bee in his bonnet about
reforming spelling. ISTR that he left money in his will to pursue this.
>
Carol responds:
You may be right about Shaw advocating spelling reform (it wouldn't
surprise me at all), but it was definitely George Orwell who advocated
Basic English (though I admit I should have looked it up yesterday
rather than waiting until today). He was a proponent of Basic English
until about 1944, when he changed his mind (and ridiculed the concept
through the Newspeak of "1984").

His 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language," which expresses
his concern with political jargon and its effects on ordinary English
(he should be alive today to see what's happening now), contains the
following (IMO) delightful parody:

"[Original passage from Ecclesiastes, King James version:]

"'I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the
swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise,
nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill;
but time and chance happeneth to them all.'

"Here it is in modern English:

"Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the
conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits
no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a
considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken
into account."

He's right, IMO. A *lot* of twentieth- (and twenty-first-) century
writing sounds exactly like that "modern English" passage, deadly
dull, colorless, abstract, and not worth remembering. He advocates the
following simple rules:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you
are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if
you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.

With the possible exception of the third rule (e.g., a lot of people
omit "that's" that ought to be left in for clarity's sake, IMO), I
agree with him.

Back to Basic English, an 850-word basic vocabulary that was
originally intended as a tool for teaching English to non-native speakers:

http://www.articleworld.org/index.php/Basic_English

Orwell stopped advocating it when he realized that it would strip
English writing of most of its color without making it any clearer.
(Supposedly another advocate of Basic, Winston Churchill, gave up on
it when he found out that "blood, toil, sweat, and tears" would be
rendered as "blood, hard work, eyewash and body water," but that
sounds like a linguistic urban legend to me.

Don't know how I got here from Webster's simplified spelling. GBS
might be closer to a British Webster, after all.

http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/essays/politics-english-language1.htm

Carol, who will check into Shaw's ideas on spelling reform tomorrow if
she can find the time